Rebirth

So after being cancelled for a few years, Futurama is back baby! The first episode concluded and wrapped the ending of Into The Wild Green Yonder very nicely, and even had a good plot twist. Though by far not the best episode of Futurama, this was a decent starting episode overall and will most likely get better over time.

The episode begins with Fry coming in the Planet Express building discovering that his hair is messed up and having severe burns, asking Farnsworth inside what happened. Farnsworth realises that Fry doesn't remember, and retells him what happened. The crew were escaping Zapp and it turns out that the wormhole was a shipping channel and that they were back at Earth. Unfortuantly, Zapp manages to hit the ship and they end up crashing. Before this, Farnsworth activates the ship's safety spheres which protects everyone's heads (except Farnsworth, who has a full body sphere) and they all end up crashing in an explosion. Fry asks where the others are now, and it turns out they're dead and hooked with their skeletons dangling.

Farnsworth shows Fry the rebirthing device he made, and chucks the dead crew into the machine's liquid "stem cell" goo. The machine manages to recreate the whole crew (except Zapp) and Bender comes out with a problem of having to dance and keep moving to avoid exploding. Fry wonders where Leela is, and as she comes out, she doesn't awaken and as a result is seemingly stuck in a permanent coma. Fry, upset at Leela's loss, decides to build a bot to try and forget about her. He then finds out that Hermes can obtain Leela's past memories to reinstall herself onto the bot as a duplicate, and as a result she thinks she survived the crash. She doesn't realise she's a robot, until Nibbler bites a chunk out of her arm, and she sees wires inside her. Confused on why she still has the same emotions and feelings for Fry, Fry and Leela head to a studio nightclub, and conclude that they should still both be friends, whilst Bender keeps dancing to stay alive. With one last attempt to try to awaken the comatosed Leela, Farnsworth uses a standard "wake up" medicine of throwing her around and making loud noises, but with no luck. Fry has to seemingly accept her death, whilst the robot Leela tries to comfort him. Due to Leela's will stating if she is in a coma, her body is to be fed to the wild Cyclophage. Fry kisses the real Leela and mourns a little, whilst the beast approaches them. Because Bender can't stop dancing, he attracts attention, and when he burps out fire, he awakens the real Leela. The real Leela is confused on why there's a 2nd Leela that Fry was kissing, but the crew run back to the ship before getting attacked by the beast, which attaches itself to the ship with its tongue whilst fleeing. Back at Planet Express, the two Leela's are confused on who Fry is in love with, and Fry talks to himself about his feelings for her, in which grabs both the Leela's attentions and causes a fight. Fry is given a gun to shoot the robot Leela, but accidently fires upon himself, revealing that he is a robot too. Farnsworth tells Fry that there's more to it than he originally told him. Just before the ship crashed, Fry gave Leela extra cover by protecting her from the blast. Fry was actually obliterated, whilst Leela survived. The original Leela, so distraught by this, made her own bot of Fry as a result, and as they kissed, the electricity in the Fry bot electricuted both of them and got Leela killed, as well as delivery short memory loss. This resulted in the Fry hair at the beginning of the episode and why he doesn't remember. After the group of Leela's realise that the real Fry is dead, Fry actually comes out of the rebirth machine, and both robot versions of Fry and Leela say they love each other, and ditch their skins and leave the crew as a result. The real Fry confessed to real Leela about his love to her, whilst Bender gets sick and tired of partying to stay alive. Just as he's heating up, the Cyclops beast appears and eats Bender, exploding whilst he's inside and killing the monster. At the same time, this causes Bender to return back to normal, and as a result everyone celebrates to party, with the crew leaving the room, whilst Zapp comes out of the machine sliding out unnoticed.

The things I did like about this episode that it kept Fry and Leela related, and felt more like Futurama than the movies. However, the Bender subplot was maybe a tiny bit annoying, but a few good lines came out of it and I have enjoyed it more on reruns, plus it does have a purpose. One joke I didn't like involved Leela, because it felt out of place for Futurama and very Simpsons-y. Most of the jokes worked though, and all the plot points are wrapped up nicely from the end of Into The Wild Green Yonder. It's maybe not the most perfect way to return, but Rebirth made sense and was entertaining, and that's good enough for me!

The first episode of the second run really shows that Futurama is BACK. Lots of great jokes and action as well as a few emotional shipping between Fry and Leela, AND a Twilight Zone-ish twist at the end makes me believe that this must be the most thought out episode of the season.

What annoys me is how this episode keeps being a link between the films and the new season in a way that is unavaidoble (how else would they explain the ending of Into the Wild Green Yonder?), and even though it is handled wonderfully it annoys me to hell that I will never be able to look at it as a normal episode just for fun. As I'm sure many agrees, I also find the pace to be quite troubling. The writers are clearly still stuck in the "film mode", trying to fit all too many plots into a single episode, which causes the episode to rush through and we miss many scenes before barely being introduced to them.

But it also introduces the new run so wonderfully, bringing in all elements of the series right there, right then, from real science fiction moments and geeky jokes further on to the silly humour (Fry beating Leela with a bat, and of course "poke harder, damn it!" "I'm poking as hard as I can!") and the emotional scene with Leela sneaking up on Fry by the window.

There is also the semi-b-plot with Bender having to keep partying not to blow up. While others seem to find it unnecessary (and I can agree) it actually included quite hilarious scenes and background gags, not to mention a perfect reintroduction to Bender.

A great return to the show. The pacing is a little off and the plot seems a bit all over the place, but I put this down to the show having to deal with quite a lot, being a transitional episode from the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder, into new Futurama. The plot has a really, really cool basic premise and for the most part, plays out brilliantly. There's a fantastic twist and it handles the whole Fry/Leela situation quite nicely. The plot does feel a bit messy though and a handful of the jokes are downright terrible -but the vast majority of the humour is absolutely hilarious and more than makes up for the weak jokes, just as the plot's overall strength makes up for the weak elements. It's not an all-time classic episode, but it's a very strong one and a great start to the season and it's nice to see that the voice-work and animation quality are as good as ever even if the music is possibly the worst work in the show's entire run -something I would put down to it now being synthesized if it wasn't for the fact that Bender's Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs both had wonderful music.

"Rebirth" is the first episode of Futurama's TV relaunch on Comedy Central, and it picks up immediately where "Into the Wild Green Yonder" left off -- with our heroes plunging into a wormhole which miraculously takes them back to Earth, with Zapp Brannigan in hot pursuit. Almost all of the characters are killed in a crash, with only their heads preserved, and Farnsworth embarks upon a massive experiment to resurrect them. Unfortunately, the experiment fails to resurrect Leela, and Fry is so crushed that he builds a robot copy of Leela to replace her. Robo-Leela is horrified to learn that she is merely a copy of the real Leela, causing tension between herself and Fry. Of course, just as Robo-Leela appears ready to accept her condition and reunite with Fry, the real Leela revives. Meanwhile, Bender is revived in a weakened condition and survives only with the help of one of Farnsworth's doomsday devices, forcing him to party continuously in order to burn off the excess energy and not cause a massive explosion.

Even though it's a re-premiere episode, "Rebirth" doesn't spend a whole lot of time trying to spell things out for a new audience -- it briefly re-introduces the characters and goes over the conclusion of "Into the Wild Green Yonder" quickly, but that's about it. The rest of the episode is devoted to Fry and Leela (with Bender constantly dancing in the background). "Rebirth" is funny in spots (Farnsworth especially is brillant throught the episode, and the scenes where the two Leelas fight are also quite hilarious) and melancholy in others (aided by Christopher Tyng's excellent score), but it's disappointing that the writers recycle ideas from earlier in the series (specifically, uploading a human's essence into a robot was considered perverse in "I Dated a Robot" but is considered acceptable here).